BAFTA 2011

A few thoughts on last nights BAFTA awards. Before I get onto the winners, a few observations. The BAFTA’s are awards given by a national academy in their own right and often make better choices than the oscars, and yet IMDB reduce them to The Road to the Oscars along with other awards such as the starfuckers of The Hollywood Foreign Press Association responsible for the golden globes. There were a lot of winners missing from the ceremony, are the BAFTA’s losing their appeal or did they all think they would miss out to The King’s Speech. Finally why do they not show the awards live on the BBC?

Best Film

Winner: The King’s Speech: No real surprise here, it is what everyone was expecting and I am certainly not upset by it. A fantastic movie that deserves all the great press it is getting but is it the best film of the year? For me sadly not although I gave it five stars out of five when reviewing it, I gave the same to Black Swan and Inception. The Social Network narrowly missed out on the full five stars. True Grit only opened in the UK on Friday and I will be seeing it in the next few days, I really don’t know what loophole made it eligible. My choice for the Best Film wold have been Inception.

Alexander Korda Award for Outstanding British Film of the Year

Winner: The King’s Speech: The other nominations were: 127 Hours, Another Year, Four Lions, Made in Dagenham. All great movies, I think they got it right though.

Best Actor

Winner: Colin Firth for The King’s Speech: Definitely the right choice, Firth was outstanding but lets not forget it is a strong category. Although Biutiful was a little esoteric and incoherent but Javier Bardem’s performance was brillient and Firths greatest challenger. Jesse Eisenberg and James Franco both played real life people with questionable reputations, the actors made them both human and sympathetic. As mentioned above I Am yet to see True Grit but Jeff Bridges is always worth watching.

Best Actress

Winner: Natalie Portman for Black Swan: I have made no secret my opinion on this one, I would have given the award to Jennifer Lawrence for Winter’s Bone who wasn’t nominated. Of the nominees Natalie Portman was the right choice. Noomi Rapace who was excellent in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the real winner, although she didn’t pick up the award she has stepped onto the world stage and picked up some high profile roles. Both Annette Bening and Julianne Moore picked up nominations for The Kids Are All Right, both where great but not worth an award. I look forward to seeing how good Hailee Steinfeld is in True Grit.

Best Supporting Actor

Winner: Geoffrey Rush for The King’s Speech: Rush was excellent but did he win on his own merits or was it just part of the groundswell and Zeitgeist that goes with The King’s Speech? For my money Andrew Garfield should have won for The Social Network, not only was his the pest supporting performance of the year, but ti was also his only chance for a major award as he has been criminally overlooked by the Oscars. Again a strong category, Christian Bale, Mark Ruffalo and the late great Pete Postlethwaite could have all walk away with the award in other years.

Best Supporting Actress

Winner: Helena Bonham Carter for The King’s Speech: How Lesley Manville didn’t win for Another Year, I will never know, at least she got a nomination, The Oscars didn’t recogniser her great performance. As strong as the supporting actor category, Amy Adams for The Fighter; Barbara Hershey for Black Swan and Miranda Richardson for Made in Dagenham could easily walked away with the award.

David Lean Award for Achievement in Direction

Winner: David Fincher for The Social Network: Although not the best movie of the year this was the right choice. Making such an entertaing and enthralling movie out of so little is a testament to the writing and the direction. To put it simply, it is the most directed movie of the shortlist. The other Nominees were: Darren Aronofsky for Black Swan; Danny Boyle for 127 Hours; Tom Hooper for The King’s Speech and Christopher Nolan for Inception.

Best Screenplay (Original)

Winner: David Seidler for The King’s Speech: Had it been the most original screenplay Christopher Nolan would surely have won for Inception, as it was The Kings Speech was a good choice. The other nominees were: Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, John J. McLaughlin for Black Swan; Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson for The Fighter and Lisa Cholodenko, Stuart Blumberg for The Kids Are All Right.

Best Screenplay (Adapted)

Winner: Aaron Sorkin for The Social Network: There was only one choice for this one, everything I said about best director goes double for the screenplay. The other nominees where: Danny Boyle, Simon Beaufoy for 127 Hours; Rasmus Heisterberg, Nikolaj Arcel for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; Michael Arndt for Toy Story 3: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen for True Grit.

Best Cinematography

Winner: Roger Deakins for True Grit: Having not see the movie yet I don’t know if it was the right choice, hopfully they didn’t take th lowest common denominator approach and given the award to the movie with the prettiest pictures. Of the other four (Anthony Dod Mantle, Enrique Chediak for 127 Hours; Matthew Libatique Black Swan; Wally Pfister for Inception and Danny Cohen for The King’s Speech), all of which I have seen, I would have gone for Black Swan, not only is the movie strangely beautiful but it is also amazingly lit and composed.

Best Film not in the English Language

Winner: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a great movie and it would have been a worthy winner if not for The Secret in Their Eyes, a phenomenal movie that picked up the equivelent Oscar last year. The other Nominees were: Biutiful; I Am Love; Of Gods and Men.

Best Animated Feature Film

Winner: Toy Story 3: I can’t say much on this one as the winning movie was the only one I saw, the other nominees were: Despicable Me and How to Train Your Dragon.

Orange Rising Star Award

Winner: Tom Hardy: The only category voted for by the public. I struggled with my vote: Tom Hardy was great in inception but for me already an established star. Gemma Arterton was certainly an established star and with a mixture of indie and blockbuster movies 2010 was a big year for her, I must admit I never saw the attraction (from and acting point of view) until I saw The Disappearance of Alice Creed. Andrew Garfield had a great year with a movie stealing performance in The Social Network and the lead role in the new Spider-Man Reboot. Aaron Johnson does define rising star having come out of nowhere in the last eighteen months. Like all the other nominees Emma Stone has been kicking around for a few years now, having seen her in a few movies she really came to my attention in Zombieland in 2009, she built on this last year with Easy A. In the end I went for Andrew Garfield

Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer

Winner: Four Lions: Christopher Morris(Director/Writer): My choice would have been Gareth Edwards(Director/Writer) for Monsters, a movie I consider good enough to have been nominated in the Best picture category. Unfortunately genre movies tend not to be considered award worthy! The other nominees were: Clio Barnard, Tracy O’Riordan(Director, Producer) for The Arbor; Banksy, Jaimie D’Cruz(Director, Producer) for Exit Through the Gift Shop; Nick Whitfield(Director/Writer) Skeletons.

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11 Responses

I worry about you Fands. I loved Inception as much as the next man, but do you really think its better than Social Network?
as an exploration of an idea and an action movie, its really fun, but if you compare performances and, more importantly, script from the two films its plain to see which is better.
and it isnt the one where the chemist forgot to tell everyone they cant die in this dream in order to give the audience something to be scared about

But if you compare direction, it’s plain to see which is the greater accomplishment. Fincher deserves the win and I would love to see him win the Oscar, but Nolan’s work on Inception vastly outweighs Fincher’s on The Social Network.

The story of Facebook isn’t complicated; the film’s greatest narrative accomplishment is that a dramatic interpretation of how Facebook was born shouldn’t be interesting, and yet somehow Fincher makes it totally gripping. And it’s supremely well-crafted. So I’m not taking away anything from the film, which landed in the #5 slot on my top 10.

But that said, Nolan takes something that’s supremely complicated and makes it simultaneously accessible to the mainstream and also complex enough to occupy and be gratifying for the intellectual cineaste crowd. Inception is the kind of film that will be dissected by film scholars and critics for years, yet it raked in cash hand over fist and became the phenomenon of the summer season; while Fincher’s feat ain’t small potatoes, it’s much harder to strike the balance Nolan does on even an adequate level, much less the level Nolan takes the film to. It’s satisfying as an action film and as a bit of cerebral mindfuckery, incredibly detailed and yet easily understood– on a base level– all at the same time.

I stand by Inception as the best movie of 2010. As mentioned above I do think The Social Network deserved its screenplay and directing awards as they crafted such a great film out of so little but I still believe Inception is the better film.

As to the awards, I’m not at all surprised to see The King’s Speech rock everyone’s world, and Rush’s win is not only deserved but also a sign that maybe Bale doesn’t have the Oscar quite as locked up as suspected. Rush probably didn’t have his chances hurt by the fact that The King’s Speech is such an awards show monster, but the performance he gives is certainly worth rewarding.

I didn’t see the other films in the foreign language category, but any of them should have won over the highly overrated and pretty bad Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Noomi Rapace is easily the best part of the entire movie.

Love seeing Tom Hardy win the Rising Star award– it’s more than appropriate and deserved considering how much great work the guy has done of late.

Andrew, I agree with you that Inception is entertaining and gets you thinking, but there seems to be this myth that unless you come up with a huge action sequence its not really directing. people keep talking, wrongly i think, about Social Network being some kind of slumming-it-fest for Fincher, just because it doesnt have a camera zooming through a kettle.
which is bollox. directing on one level is about swooping camera movements and set pieces, but on another its about coaxing great performances out of actors and doing the story service.

Well, I don’t know who’s peddling that myth but it’s not me. Nor do I think of The Social Network as a slum-fest for Fincher, and anyone who says otherwise is full of it– TSN is supremely well-crafted and contains, for example, the best use of tilt-shift photography in any movie released in 2010 (that I saw anyhow).

Directing is about everything. It’s about getting the set pieces together, it’s about setting up the shots, it’s about drawing excellence out of the cast, it’s about taking a script and making it palatable while lending your personal vision to it. When you’re arguing about two films like Inception and The Social Network you really can’t go wrong, but Inception‘s scope of vision and the general complexity of the film speak volumes to how much work Nolan had to do to successfully make it come alive.

That’s not to take anything away from Fincher, who deserves to win Best Director at the Oscars this year, but Inception is much, much more than a slam-bang piece of entertainment, and from a directorial standpoint is a massive accomplishment.

hehe, its good to get a bit of debate going all the same, and Andrew makes a lot of good points.
I had an argument (shock!) with some people i was watching the Baftas with along these lines:
if youre Tom Hooper, and your film has been crowned best picture and best british picture and best screenplay… shouldnt you be pretty much expected to win best director?
basically what i was driving at was shouldnt the person who was pretty much in charge of the best picture be given the award for best director?
its more a hypothetical argument. im no lover of the kings speech, although i think it is good sunday afternoon entertainment.
and when it boils down to it, i dont know anything about directing or all the different work that goes into it. and i know producers and actors and writers also have their contribution, but basically the director is the main dude, right?
theres a history – perhaps more recently – of Oscar rewarding films but not directors. when it used to be a given that if you got one you got the other too. what do you think Fands?

I think if we followed that logic only one film would win every award at every awards show and nothing would be interesting. (Not that they’re all that interesting now, it’s just that they’d be less interesting.)

Tom Hooper made a great movie with The King’s Speech, but it’s not a director’s movie. It’s an actor’s movie. Hooper does a more than admirable job setting the stage for his cast and he clearly worked well enough with Firth and Rush and so on to help bring those performances out, but the truth is that the bulk of the film’s success lies in what the actors, and not Hooper, bring to the picture. Directors don’t get all of the credit for a great performance; actors and actresses bring their own processes to the roles they play.

So you take a film like The King’s Speech, which looks great and is crafted competently and acted perfectly, and then you stack it up against a movie like The Social Network, which is clearly a success largely in part due to Fincher’s above-and-beyond efforts in direction. Take Fincher out of TSN and you’d have a very different movie, one that likely wouldn’t be anywhere near as good as it is. Take Hooper out of The King’s Speech and you’d probably still have that excellent relationship between Rush and Firth. See what I mean?